Microsoft open sources .Net server stack

Joab Jackson |
Nov. 13, 2014

In an effort to broaden its reach beyond Windows developers, Microsoft has released as open source the server-side components of its .Net framework and embarked on a project to port the runtime software to Linux and Mac OS.

Microsoft hopes to have the first working versions of the Linux and Mac versions of .Net available within the next few months, Somasegar said.

Microsoft's new Visual Studio Community, available Wednesday, is also aimed at broadening the company's developer base. The company already offers a free stripped-down version of the IDE, called Visual Studio Express, though this new offering offers most all of the capabilities of the professional edition of Visual Studio, Somasegar said. It also allows developers to access the 5,000 Visual Studio extensions created by Microsoft and others.

The company also released as previews the next versions of Visual Studio and .Net, to be named Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 2015. With this release, .Net naming has switched from incremental version numbers to a year-based naming scheme. This will be the first version of .Net to run the Roslyn compiler.

The new Visual Studio will come with tools to do unit testing, an emulator for testing code on Android devices, and a new feature called Connected Services, which connects programs with external APIs (application programming interfaces).